History lesson: Magazine index & magazine database

It was 1976 when four entrepreneurs - Brett Butler (who died earlier this year), Dick Kollin (the only person to grace the cover of ONLINE twice), Buster Spiwak, and Lyle Priest - unleashed Magazine Index into the burgeoning online world. Operating as Information Access Company (IAC), they produced the first database that consolidated indexes to popular magazines into a single searchable file. Magazine Index was originally offered on Lyle's invention - a unique microfilm reader known as a ROM reader. It moved online as File 47 on Dialog in 1977. In 1980, Information Access Company was acquired by Ziff-Davis, which at the time owned rights to many of the publications indexed in Magazine Index. In 1985, portions of Magazine Index were incorporated into InfoTrac, the first laser disk reference product on the market.